Rethinking Fancy Flyers

Being a data geek, I want to be able to track what does and doesn’t work in my marketing, I want to put as many numbers behind my marketing plan as possible.

Take the humble in-home flyer, for instance. They’re usually a showy display of photos of the house with some basic information on there. When I represent buyers, they nearly always pick one of those up, even though they have a copy of the listing in their hand from me.

And then those flyers end up abandoned in the back seat of my car with the other fourteen flyers and rejected listing printouts. Once a flyer is gone, you have no idea if that buyer is still interested. All you know is that the stack you gave your seller is gone, and you need to go pony up for some more fancy printing.

So I tried something different this time around – and was a bit surprised at the result.

Instead of putting flyers in the home, I made little tent cards. It’s the size of a business card, it folds over, it fits easily in a pocket or purse. The front is a picture of the home, the back is my name and brokerage disclosures, and inside is the address, price, and vital home facts.

People actually take that thing home and look up that URL. I know. I didn’t think it would work either.

By creating a BudURL, I can track how many people visit that link – and there’s IP address tracking even on the free version so I can see how many are new visits and how many are repeat visits. And with BudURL, I can create a custom alias so I can make the link include the street name so it is easy to type in. There are lots of other link shorteners, maybe even others that do custom aliases. I just found BudURL first and stuck.

And then the BudURL link redirects to the single property page on my blog, which gives them the goods as promised. More pictures, more description, and a file they can download with disclosures and whatnot.

And – side bonus – it drives people back to my site. Which is always a good thing, in my humble opinion.

So someone took that little fold over card, and held on to it long enough to take it home and look at that link. They were clearly already in the house, already seen what it looks like in person. But now they want more information. Which probably means they’re at least somewhat interested in the property.

And that’s a whole lot more information than I ever got out of a silly fancy-schmancy home flyer.

And then I started thinking about my new listing. It was purchased as a foreclosure last year and the owners put $50k of love into it, only to be transferred to a new city. Since the home sold just last year, I have to have a pretty good justification for setting the list price higher than what they bought it for.

Basically, I want to arm any potential buyer’s agent with all the information that I have – the upgrades, the receipts, the inspection reports – I want to put my price justification, my marketing into their hands so that I get to influence them first as to price and condition.

But how do I make sure they get it? I’ve got limited space in the MLS description and sure, I can upload documents to the documents section, but no one ever looks there.

Behold, the agent comment section. And once again, BudURL to the rescue. I made a document with all the information a buyer’s agent could ever want, uploaded it to my blog, and then made a BudURL link to that file, typed it into the agent comments with a note that says full information, disclosures, and inspection reports are all at that link.

Heck, I can’t even make it a clickable link in the agent comments. But those agents, they copy and paste it into their browser and I have proof that I put a fabulous defense of the house and its price into a potential buyer’s agent hands.

I have a suggestion – add a QR Code to the tent card and use them on all printed collateral – the QR Code contains the URL for the house. All the new smartphones with cameras have QR Code apps (free) that can scan the code and go to the website.
I even make a large version of the code for my clients so they can put it on the yard sign.
I’ve been seeing them in more and more places. Ever notice how many are now showing up in magazine ads? One of the most difficult things to do in advertising is to get someone to go from one medium and switch to a second one – with more and more people putting their lives on their smartphones and typically have them on their person all the time – this is a tipping point – now people pull out their phone and click on the code.